Steve Strimer, of Northampton, leads a Sojourner Truth historical walk in Florence last year in observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The Republican file / Dave Roback

NORTHAMPTON – The crowd tramped up and down Pine and Nonotuck streets and rather cheerfully stood in the cold as Steve Strimer gave his frosty talks in his Andean cap. There were perhaps 30 people on this Martin Luther King Day walk, enough to emphasize the cramped qualities of 19th century homes like the David Ruggles Center on 25 Nonotuck.

In a community that seems as white as the January snow, it seemed odd to discover a genuine black connection on Martin Luther King Day, but Florence was significantly diverse back in the day.

According to Strimer, a good 10 percent of the population was black in the Underground Railroad days of the American Civil War. If you told me that Strimer knows where every single freed and fugitive slave lived, I would believe you, but the history of Florence is rich in this regard and Strimer claims to have barely scratched the surface. He’s learning more and more all the time from geneology centers and newspaper date banks.

“This means we’ll fill in the files about these folks,” he said.

Strimer, 62, hails from Ohio but has lived in the Northampton area ever since he graduated from Amherst College in 1973. He helped start Collective Copies, a copy and printing place with offices in Florence and Amherst that, as the name indicates, is owned and operated by the people who work there. In 1997, Strimer read a book called “The Communitarian Moment” about Northampton Association of Education and Industry and realized he had spiritual and philosophical forebears right in his back yard.

“The fact that Florence was founded as a 100 percent worker-owned cooperative has been important to me,” he said.

The Northampton Association of Education and Industry would still be considered progressive today. It advocated for the rights of women, workers and minorities, many of whom were otherwise known as slaves back then. There was even a black man named Marion Turner who dressed openly as a woman at the turn of the 20th century, a not uncommon sight on the streets of Northampton today.

Houses around here that look like they need new porches and paint jobs were stops on the Underground Railroad in the mid-19th century, safe houses for slaves fleeing the South. Some of the freed slaves settled here in modest factory-worker houses. Strimer knows where most of them are, who lived there and when.

The Northampton Association had some stars like Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Sojourner Truth and Ruggles. Truth has been memorialized with a statue on Pine Street, not far from the 35 Park Street house where she lived. Ruggles, a black journalist and publisher, has the Center to his name. Strimer and the David Ruggles Center Committee have been struggled for several years to finance the project. He’s hoping a National Park Service grant puts them over the top so they can open the Center on a regular basis starting this year.

Although the progressive spirit of the Northampton Association lives on, the community today is nowhere near as diverse as it was in its 19th century heyday. What happened, I asked Strimer, to the descendants of all those folks? That’s one mystery he has yet to solve. Some, he conjectures, moved to bigger cities where larger segments of the black diaspora settled. Truth moved to Michigan. Strimer, meanwhile, pricks his ears whenever he hears an odd name like “Dorsey.”